Ecclesiastes Rant

I've been studying Ecclesiastes a bit lately in prep for a series that will begin this Sunday and run through the summer. It is a rant, but a rant with wisdom.

The underbelly of the Ecclesiastes rant is the possibility of a meaningful life. It seems that for life to be meaningful – or to put it this way: our aspirations and deeds to be meaningful -- there would need to be a predicable outcome.

Those who seek God and work hard to be honest in this life should be rewarded and the wicked punished. The hardworking Calvinist, the one Covey would approve of, should get to enjoy the benefits of his work (we have all heard of someone who died the day after they retired). The one who seeks wisdom should be rewarded and something should distinguish the wise from the foolish in death. A person would expect in a meaningful life that there would be a reasonable correspondence between deed and consequence or virtue and reward. But Ecclesiastes writes what we all have experienced: life is not fair, there are contradictions, and life is certainly not consistent -- why would an elite athlete die early from a heart attach, while an inactive. overweight smoker live to be 80?

Even in his writings he contradicts himself. Imagine that, writings about contradictions have contradictions within themselves -- is this a cool teaching method? It’s similar to explaining redundancy as the act of repeating yourself and saying the same thing over and over again by saying it multiple times. Get it?

Life doesn’t makes sense, nor does this blog, nor does the writer of Ecclesiastes. Frustrated by the incoherence in life the writer calls the world “senseless” or “absurd.”